April 15, 2003

Loot first, shame later  

Steven Landsburg has another lifeless economic analysis over at Slate - this time he's talking about the economic implications of looting. First he explains the conventional wisdom on what makes looting bad, but then he says something surptising:

But I wonder how much of the property in Baghdad was legitimately earned in the first place. Iraq, for at least two decades, has been a society where many rewards have flowed not to those who served the needs of the marketplace, but to those who served the needs of the tyrant. If those rewards are redistributed to the tyrant's victims, that's fine with me.
I wouldn't have expected this kind of redistributionist thinking from Landsburg, but I do have some sympathy for the argument that what's being stolen ultimately belongs to the people of Iraq. Unfortunately, he seems to have missed some of the nuance here. It's not clear whether he thinks accomplishing this redistribution by looting is efficient, or equitable, or both...

I see two big holes in his analysis. First of all, he's all too willing to accept massive income inequality as a justification for a complete breakdown in property rights. Aren't well defined and accepted property rights the most fundamental component of a market economy? But for days, American forces sat idly by, watching these rights disintegrate. I believe this has serious implications for Iraq's future.

The other issue specifically involves the looting of museums. The archaeological treasures being taken are (or at least, were) public goods, so for an economist their value is a summation of individual utilities. But all this value is lost when they're distributed privately, because they can only be appreciated by a much smaller number of individuals. The suggestion that they belong to the Iraqi people is specious - Iraqis still posess them if they remain in the museum, don't they?

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